Post Of The Month got a bit overtaken by spam but I still think its a good idea. So here are the nominations thus far. You have until Saturday to get any more in. Remember they've got to have been posted in September.
How To Explain RSS The Oprah Way
We Are The Hollow Men
Snakes On A Plane, The Death Of Citizen Marketing
Science And Engineering Visualization Challenge 2006
thankyou for your kind attention
Dave and I had the tremendous honour of recording an episode of American Copywriter last week, while we were in Kansas City. I've not brought myself to listen to it in detail but I suspect Dave and John will give good podcast and I'll um and er a lot. That's normally the way.
I'm often conscious that my musings on brands and stuff can easily get a bit abstract and un-useful. All this talk of polyphonic brands and the tyranny of the big idea is fine if you're coffeeing with a bunch of smarty-pants planners but not much use if you're trying to get a campaign for a hard-nosed tyre retailer out the door and still get home in time for your child's birthday. Or something.
Anyway.
One of the regular emails I get is - what creative brief template do you use? And of course being a smarty-pants planner I tend to say that I don't believe in a standard template and it just leads to form-filing and while that's sort of true, if asked to write a brief I probably know what boxes I'd have, and how to fill them in. And anyway, there are other people out there, probably in a planning department of one who'd just like some help in what should go on a good creative brief. So I thought maybe we should try a wisdom of the crowds thing and try to build the ultimate, all-purpose, ready for anything, use-it-until-you've-learned-to-do-without-it creative brief template.
I realise that this could be a rather protracted business, because your feelings on what should go into a creative brief are intimately tied to your beliefs about how you think communication works. And that's a whole, well, thing. But it'll be interesting to try.
I suspect at some point we'll resort to wikis and voting and probably a flickr group and geotagging but I think the first move in OpenCreativeBrief2.0 should be for people to post stuff in this comments field here. The stuff I'm thinking of would include:
Sections that you think should go on a creative brief (I'm assuming we'll have sections, you know, boxes to be filled in). It doesn't have to be all of them, just your favourites.
Links to, or copies of, fine examples of the creative brief art. So this can become a bit of a Creative Brief resource.
Criteria for our ultimate brief template other than the ones I'm going to write now:
1. Let's stipulate that this is the document that accompanies a briefing. It won't simply be emailed to someone or slipped under a door. It will be accompanied by your exciting self, emoting and inspiring like crazy.
2. But it has to be complete. We can't design something that's brilliantly brief - four catchy sentences say, but is then accompanied by a forty-page document that explains everything else. This thing we're building has to contain everything the recipient needs to know to do the job we're asking of them.
3. This is a document addressed to a team of doers (let's call them creative people). We're asking them to come up with an idea or ideas that involve changing the relationship between a brand, product, service or company and some people. (I'm trying to write that has un-adcentrically as possible, does it make sense?)
How does that sound? I'm rather looking forward to this. Let's go to work.
Just to confirm, coffee morning will be in session on Friday. 11am. The Breakfast Club. Come one, come all.
w+k london will tell you that Paul Colman is a great client and I can see why they say that. He's been the most thorough of all our judges to date, including me, and probably the most demanding. That's how you get great work, but I should warn all the entrants that they're not going to be heaped in praise. Here's the summary of this thoughts:
"On the whole all the entries were a little disappointing. There was some good stuff in all of them, but they didn’t realise the ideas nearly as well as they could have.
I found it hard to pick a winner as they all had some strength’s, but in different areas – some had insight without strategic justification, while others had strategic justification without any real insight into the sport.
In terms of a winner I’d chose A. It didn’t cover a lot of aspects of the problem and wasn’t that well presented, but there was enough in it for me to want to know more.
A special mention should go to E, which was head and shoulders above the others in terms of presentation; brilliant use of images and succinct but powerful words. Unfortunately thought there was a lack of strategic justification, therefore it didn’t win."
But don't be downhearted because a) this was a really tough task and b) Paul's comments should defintely help you get better.
I'd add this for myself; you're almost all using lots of pictures and stuff, which is great, but don't use pictures instead of using thinking. Your pictures should help to clarify or amplify the points you want to make, but you should have a really clear sense of those points. The presentations should be logical and clear without the pictures. I don't mind ambiguity in an ad but I don't think we should accept it in a strategic document.
All the entries are below, with Paul's comments. Also you should have a look at the notes that Paul wrote for himself before he started marking them (told you he was thorough). You should look at these because they illustrate the discipline that leads to great strategy. I suspect that I too often give the impression that great thinking springs from a few days mucking about blogging and drinking coffee, it doesn't, it comes from the sort of rigour Paul demonstrates here (a word document).
MMA-A.ppt MMA-B.ppt MMA-D.ppt MMA-E.PDF feedback_to_entry_e.doc
So, many thanks to everyone for playing. You took on a high-level of technical difficulty and not many people were brave enough to attempt it so congrats to everyone who took part.
I'll post the next assignment in the next couple of days, I think we might do some back-to-basics stuff.
I know it's a few days late. Sorry. But here's an interview with Dr. Louann Brizendine on 'The Female Brain'.
Here I go again, would you expect anything else? All the channels at the Intercontinental At The Plaza, Kansas City.
So, I've been having an excellent couple of days in Kansas City. Dave and I came out here to do some stuff for the Barkley Evergreen Creative Symposium. Every year they close the agency for two days and get all kinds of speakers in to inspire and excite the whole company. Very good idea. The venue was much cooler than the usual life-shrinking hotel basement conference facility. It was this old theatre place, the stage looked like this:
Kind of intimidating. We watched a bunch of the speakers yesterday and worked out what we were going to say. Then we met up with John January from American Copywriter and recorded a podcast which was a big highlight for me. What a splendid fellow he is. Though I suspect he egged me into annoying more people with my podcast contributions. Dinner that night included the irresistible Ze Frank who is both more and less manic than he seems from The Show.
Kanas City coffee morning was a resounding success. I was joined at an early hour by Andrew and Bruno, both from SHS. Very kind of them both to keep me company.
Dave and I did our thing, which seemed to go OK. The Barkley people were really smart and enthusiastic, great for working with. Hope they enjoyed it. Big thanks to Jim and Kay for looking after us.
Once we'd done our thing I wondered over to the Nelson-Atkins Museum which I really enjoyed. There wasn't the sheer amount of stuff you get in the great metropolitan musuems but I liked that because it makes you pay more attention to what's actually there.
I noticed this 18th century 'Jug In The Form Of A Bear' which looked exactly like one of these new generation of vinyl toys you'd get from Playlounge or Kidrobot.
And I noticed that this stained glass window appears to show Our Lady practising a googly.
